Black Jellybeans for Drusilla
by cagd
Summary: With Spring comes Easter. With Easter comes one more indignity for Spike at the hands of Drusilla. Not for the easily nauseated.


_Washington D.C., 196--_

**Sweet Little Threats**

Dru could always be counted upon to make her demands clear when it came to Easter:

"Your Ripe Wicked Plum wants an Easter basket." She'd murmur seductively oh, say, sometime around Good Friday.

"Why the hell do you want an Easter basket, Dru?" You'd snap back while pretending to be busy. "We're vampires, remember? Easter is a CHRISTIAN holiday that celebrates CROSSES."

"Your Drusilla doesn't care. Drusilla wants an Easter basket. Drusilla wants an Easter basket _full_ of black jellybeans." She'd drape herself seductively over your shoulders before taking one of your earlobes in her mouth and biting down on it ever so gently.

"Trust me poodle, Dru does _not_ want an Easter basket full of black jellybeans." Then you'd rescue your ear. This was one of those times when it was smart to keep all parts of yourself out of Dru's mouth.

"If my dark star really loved his ripe wicked plum, he'd go and steal her an Easter basket _overflowing_ with black jellybeans. Angelus would."

**Noodling for Sugar**

So, every year the night before Easter Sunday, you'd find yourself groping around under bushes, knocking over birdbaths, and getting chased by dogs when you weren't breaking into posh confectionaries - all in the name of the illicit predawn Easter egg hunt.

**The Usual Suspects**

1. Marshmallow Peeps came second in Dru's heart only to black jellybeans. Peeps were nasty: well-meaning parents hid dozens of unwrapped Peeps overnight in their yards where the morning dew transformed them into gummy nightmares. Things got ugly when Dru didn't get any, so you nicked the little 1950s outrages wherever you found them: pink, white, and _ugh,_ bilious yellow; all with bits of grass and twigs adhered to them. Your Ebon Pearl could care less about the natural additives just so long as she got her Peeps.

2. Boiled eggs? No dice! No matter how prettily decorated a boiled egg might be, Dru didn't want it. She wanted sugar and lots of it so she'd pelt you with them whenever you forgot and included a few in the night's take.

3. However, even one hollow chocolate egg in a gaudy foil wrapper made up for a lot of boiled ones. They weren't as disgusting as a damp and sticky Peep, unless they came filled with oozy marshmallow cream. Normally fastidious, Dru loved smearing the stuff in her hair and even sweeter places. Cleaning her up could lead to all sorts of sweaty fun, but she'd only do it when you were planning something profitably rotten with somebody and couldn't stop her. She would then pirouette around the lair in a sugar-fueled frenzy with half-dissolved Marshmallow Peeps and eggs matted in her hair and yours if you didn't duck in time while your partners-in-crime and your carefully maintained reputation walked away laughing their arses off at you.

4. Handmade panoramic sugar eggs were getting rare, so a really posh one decorated with gum paste flowers on the outside and a wee sugar landscape complete with ducks, rabbits, and baby chickens on the inside was an exhilarating theft. Dru demanded one every year without fail, and then would sit sobbing amidst the broken pieces, clutching Miss Edith to her cold dead heart after she inevitably dropped the newest fragile sugar masterpiece in her joy.

5. Chocolate bunnies were a genuine bit of all right. If you could get the adult version, you know, with cognac in them, so much the better. Dru always tore out their throats and eyes, leaving the gnawed high calorie carcasses for you to finish off in private because you'd die a second death if anybody ever saw you eating such a sissy thing.

But even a high quality solid chocolate rabbit and a six-pack of Guiness couldn't erase the taint of black jellybeans from Easter.

**Jellybean Rainbows**

You could handle the red ones, the pink ones, the orange ones, the purple ones, the green ones, and even the white ones though you could never see the point of white jellybeans. Anyway, you'd been showering your Ebon Poppy with pounds of them ever since they started showing up in the Easter baskets you nicked from small children's windowsills back in the 1930s.

Hell, you even _liked_ the red ones. They went well with 0+ and a Bourbon chaser.

It was only the black ones that you balked at no matter how loudly Dru demanded them, and that was only after 196-

**Suspicious Candy**

Until 196--, you never gave black jellybeans much thought. As far as you were concerned, they came from a bag, which came from a factory, and were harmless little blobs of black dye, sugar, and artificial licorice flavoring #5 mingled in with the less offensive colors of red, pink, yellow, purple, and green.

You know better now, thanks to stumbling into the Easter Bunny as it frolicked across the White House lawn:

_Bloody hell, what's…is that what I think it… no, steady-on lad, gotta be the blotter acid I washed down with vodka that I… no, smells real, like a great big rabbit hutch? It can't be… I met Father Christmas once, even shared a toddler with him, but that's not… it is!_

Convinced by your nose that the six-foot tall rabbit wearing nothing but a loud checked vest and clashing bow tie wasn't a bit of illegal chemistry out for a romp in your brain, you stalked it through the Potomac River mist.

_Wish Dru was here to see this. She'd flip!_

Half the presidential rose garden disappeared down the bunny's gullet.

_Will you look at that? Naughty naughty Peter C. Farmer Kennedy's gonna be pissed when he wakes up tomorrow morning and see's what you've been doing!_

The roses eaten, the bunny hopped here and there, nibbling away at the presidential lawn.

_If I grab Harvey 'ere and bring 'im to Dru, it'll make up for last Valentine's Day what with the fish bowl, the ten pound sack of dried butter beans, the big box of chocolate cherries and the unfortunate explosion. Hang on, what's this?_

The bunny paused, sniggering as it squatted and strained. Soon a stream of licorice reeking black pellets pattered from its backside.

_Bloody hell, are those what I think they are?_

Appalled, you crouched, frozen in mid scuttle between bushes, gaudy Easter basket dangling forgotten in one hand.

_That's disgustin', there should be a law!_

When the Easter Bunny finally noticed that it had an audience, it derisively shook its pom-pommed arse at you while scooping up a handful of still steaming turds. It then flicked them at you one by one with deadly accuracy before effortlessly clearing the Presidential fence, leaving you with pellets slowly tumbling down from your head and shoulders.

**Domestic Bliss**

"Where are Dru's black jellybeans?" Dru demanded petulantly that night after tossing aside all the chocolate eggs, Peeps, and a rainbow of regular jellybeans. "Dru wants her black jellybeans."

"Pet, trust me, _you don't want black jellybeans_."

Demon-faced, she snarled at you, "Drusilla. Wants. Black. Jelly. Beans."

"You don't want black jellybeans, _trust me pet_." You'd snarled back while washing your hair for the third time. "Trust me, _black jellybeans you don't want,_ pet."

Dru started with a low-pitched whine that grew in intensity until it was an ear-splitting shriek that climaxed with, "If you really loved your plum, you'd get her black jellybeans _right now!"_

"Pet, I do love you. _You just don't want black jellybeans._ Now go eat your nice marshmallow eggs and Peeps and be a good girl, will you?"

"Don't want nice marshmallow eggs and Peeps, Miss Edith wants black jellybeans! Black jellybeans! Black jellybeans _now_!"

Remembering what you'd witnessed on the Presidential front lawn, you shook your head firmly and then ducked as Dru lobbed a sugar egg at you like a grenade, "Sod Miss Edith! From now on until forever _you will never again eat black jellybeans,_ and that's _final_!"

"I hate you!" Dru screeched as she broke the basket over your head before storming off down the sewer tunnel the two of you infested. "Hateyouhateyouhate_you_!"

"**Give us a kiss!"**

That night Dru tackled you on the porch of the Lincoln Memorial, lips, fangs, and tongue blackly stinking of licorice, a squashed Easter bonnet askew on her head, and Peeps matted in her hair, "Drusilla found lots of lovely-lovely-lovely black jellybeans! Her dear wicked boy hid marvelous black jellybeans for her in that nice Mr. Kennedy's front yard to find and she ate them all up. Give us a kiss, sweet William, give your ebon poppy a kiss!" Dru pinned you to the sidewalk, puckering up with her black stained lips right in your face.

"Bloody hell, _no!"_ You turned your head, lips firmly to yourself as your stomach made an uneasy noise. You loved Dru, but the reek of licorice and the memory that came with it was overpowering.

"Our boy is being selfish!"

"_Selfish_ is right. Go brush your snags pet, I'm not kissing you!" You grated through clenched teeth. Your stomach made a decidedly more uneasy noise.

Dru's bony knees stabbed into your groin as she hissed, "Dru wants a kiss from her wicked, wicked child. He's being mean and won't give her one!" Around you the sleeping winos stirred, complaining at the noise as she banged your head against the concrete by your ears in time to her demands: "Give. Us. A. Kiss. _NOW!"_

"No!" you hollered up and then gagged because Dru was on you like a lamprey, her licorice polluted tongue invading your mouth, slithering around and around with her lips clamped onto yours. Your stomach went from uneasy to completely brassed off as your struggle to escape Dru's licorice embrace caused the two of you to tumble arse over teakettle down the steps of the Memorial and land with a meaty thud at the bottom, still joined at the lips.

Your stomach decided that enough was enough as you stood up and tried to pry Dru off of you by causing you to heave the night's meal all down the front of her white silk A-line dress before dropping you to your knees so that you finished your gastronomic exhibitionism by loudly vomiting all over her new shoes.

Dru swatted you with the remains of her Easter bonnet, "Bad Willie! He's ruined the queen's new party shoes; now I'll have to give them back to his Highness all dirty!"

You would have told Dru and the queen to sod off; only you were too busy demonstrating the dry heaves to say much.

Her voice softened as she knelt down beside you, draping one long, serpentine arm in its soiled elbow-length satin glove over your shoulders, cooing, "Oh, my poor darling, oh, my poor dark star, he's got a tummy ache. Let mummy take care of you."

You were too concussed from landing on your head at the bottom of the stairs to protest when Drusilla picked you up and carried you home draped over her shoulder like some oversized baby.

**The Final Indignity**

After washing off the night's accumulation of Peeps and eggs and brushing her fangs, Dru put on a silk negligee; stepping daintily over you as she braided her long black hair for bed while you lay on the floor of your shared lair, happily babbling lewd propositions to the ceiling.

Contentedly singing nursery rhymes as she undressed you, Dru then put you in a pink flannel nightie and a pair of matching bunny slippers before tucking you in beside Miss Edith. After draping a frigid hot water bottle over your feet, she crawled in next to you beneath the pile of grubby blankets that you'd stolen for her from unattended clotheslines.

**Best Served Cold**

You could forgive Dru for just about anything including the pink flannel nightie, but awakening the next evening to a pair of bunny slippers coldly staring up you with their beady little eyes was _just too much._

However, you were a gentleman about it.

You didn't rant.

You didn't rave.

You didn't bring the subject up.

Not even once.

Instead, you gleefully presented your dark rose with over thirty pounds of black jellybeans the following Easter, savoring each and every stinking black licorice kiss she gave you in her amorous delight, remembering where the things came from even as your stomach did cartwheels.


End file.
